Researchers Meet to Give Tips to Improve Opioid Addiction Treatment

NEW CASTLE, Del. - Aug. 6, 2018 - PRLog -- Researchers, specialists, and officials gathered at the Behavioral Health Consortium to present recommendations to improve opioid addiction treatment practices.

The presentation followed a review of the local addiction treatment industry, which was conducted over a period of 14 months. The review along with new data commanded a number of state officials, physicians and researchers to establish strategies to boost practices of care for people with opioid use disorders.

The strategies also looked to meet Delaware's goal of having an accessible, personalized, accountable and comprehensive addiction treatment system that relies on evidence to set guidelines and therapy methods.

A total of four strategies were introduced in a report, called 'A Blueprint for Transforming Opioid Use Disorder Treatment in Delaware' and presented by the researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The initial strategy was to increase the capacity of the substance use disorder treatment system and the researchers focused on the need to provide the community with faster assessment and intake before treatment while expanding mentorship services, chronic disease management as well as therapy and medication-assisted treatment programs.

The second introduced the need to provide addiction to groups of people that are considered to be 'high-risk populations,' including those who have a diagnosed opioid use disorder and/or those who have survived a drug overdose. It was highlighted that more crisis services need to be provided and more outreach efforts need to be made.

They emphasized that there are significant gaps in access to treatment among these high-risk groups and that closing these gaps is needed before the system can be improved.

The third consisted of developing financial incentives to drive a system reformation through quality improvement while the final strategy was to use data to push the reformation and track any progress made by the state.
The strategies address not only problem areas but also the fact that over the last few years drugs have affected more and more Delaware residents. Substance abuse, particularly opioid abuse, has increasingly been a deadly public health issue in different areas of the state.

The researchers mentioned that there were approximately 350 fatal drug overdoses in Delaware in 2017.

Moreover, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that Delaware was one of the four states where the number of emergency room visits related to opioids increased more than 50 percent from July 2016 to September 2017.

https://www.drugaddictionnow.com/2018/08/06/researchers-i...